For much of his career, Dave worked alongside people in the act of building things. Founders developing ideas that would reshape how millions of people think about wealth and possibility. Executives running institutions at a scale where every decision carried consequences that rippled outward for years. Leaders at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and human potential — people operating at the edge of what their industries had imagined possible.

He wasn't there as an observer. He was there as a collaborator — close enough to watch how extraordinary people made decisions, carried uncertainty, and navigated the distance between what they'd built and who they actually were. He developed, without yet having language for it, a particular instinct: the capacity to read people with unusual accuracy. To sense what was driving someone beneath the surface of what they were saying. To see the pattern organizing a life before the person living it could articulate it themselves.

That instinct found its fullest early expression in hospitality. For nearly a decade and a half, Dave was at the center of one of Austin's most intimate and quietly celebrated boutique properties — an operation so small, so precisely designed, and so far ahead of its time that it drew household names from across the world of business, technology, innovation, and culture. Actors. Musicians. Architects. Pioneers in fields that barely existed yet. People who had everything and were fiercely selective about how they spent their private time.

The standard they set was unforgiving in the best possible way. Not because they were demanding — most weren't — but because people who have achieved that much can feel immediately whether they are being truly seen or merely processed. The Japanese have a word for the hospitality that anticipates needs before they're expressed: Omotenashi. That was the standard. Not a service philosophy. A practice of attention.

It was during those years — surrounded by that caliber of guest, at a point in his own life when he knew it was time to chart his own course — that something coalesced. The instinct he'd been developing for decades, the capacity to read people with startling accuracy, could be made reliable. Not through intuition alone, but through a set of tools that gave it structure, precision, and reproducibility. What had always been a gift became a methodology.